martinzoo

This has been the summer of the froggy at our house. Back in April, I knew we were getting VDOT out here to fix the waterlogged ditch in our front yard. Fixing the ditch meant that we wouldn’t get any tadpoles because, hopefully, the ditch wouldn’t constantly be filled up with water. SO, I ordered tadpoles from Living Aquatics. My order from them didn’t arrive until the beginning of July.

In the meantime, guess what? We got tadpoles anyway. One rainy day the eggs were laid and we were Johnny-on-the-spot. GB came in with at least 50 tadpoles. Knowing our luck in previous years, I only expected about five of them to make it all the way through to the release date.

Well, we’ve gotten pretty good at this process now because all but three made it. And now we’ve got a tank FULL of little baby toads. My husband keeps telling everyone that it’s kind of like the ‘Where’s Waldo?’ game: the more you look in the tank, the more toads you see.

They love chilling out on this rock with the light shining down on them.

The leaves on this plant are a typical favorite, too, even for the crickets.

But this spot is numero uno on the toads’ resting spots list. It’s amazing to see how many can pile onto this one little palm tree. We think it’s hilarious when they perch at the end of the diving board, as if they will dive into the pool at any moment. You can tell they like that spot as evidenced by the froggy poop still there.

Some of them have a really pretty green color, which I don’t understand. They all came from the same batch of tadpoles. So why do some of them look like this?

This guy made it all the way to the top of the tank and was climbing all around the screen. You can’t see it, because my camera isn’t that good, but his tiny toes are curled around the lines of the screen. So cute!

See what I mean? They’re everywhere!

This has been the secret to our success this year. When the tadpoles first got their legs and became lung-breathing amphibians they would no longer eat the flake fish food. But they were too tiny for crickets; even the smallest crickets were too big. So I got a jar of flightless fruit flies. What’s great about these jars is that they are self-propagating. If you make sure that there are a few of the fruit flies in there at all times they’ll just lay more eggs and the cycle will begin again. We’d just open the jar, which has an air screen built into the lid, and shake out the larva and flies. And the baby toads would gobble them right up.

Now that we have some toads that are pretty big we feed them the little crickets. Crickets are getting kind of expensive so we are going to have a grand release party next week. GB wanted to make sure that they would be big enough to fend for themselves before we let them go.

GB also made me promise that he could keep a few. I’d like to keep a dark one and a green one and see how they grow up. But I think he’s thinking more along the lines of five toads. We’ll see.